Hostile nations of any species on your homeworld will now attempt to expand by creating new tile blockers in the best land available. This happens every 5 years on average. You have the option to accept or object to this with varying degrees of force.

Peaceful integration of hostile nation tile blockers is now possible via diplomacy.

Tooltips are of minimal value right now. Nations.2 and .201 are the peaceful integration events, Nations.3 will kick off a war ( War events sold seperately from this update).

If they decline your offer, a new tile blocker will appear. If you and the game agree about which tile blocker you should have cleared first, it should appear in the same place. Possibly not though, nothing I can do about that.

DLC starts with secondary species should use the 3rd diplomacy option to get a pop of their secondary species. This feature is also still in work, for now it just gives your main species just like the 2nd option.

The image in the diplomacy window represents a member of YOUR government, not theirs. If I figure out how to adjust this I will.

Roleplay your choices. I have no way of knowing what blocker was just cleared, and I haven't invested the effort to try to limit your options based on civics or ethics. The system is extremely cheesable if you so wish.

Initial AI setup event can now be triggered at any point via console command as intended.

Mechanists should now get their 4 robots.

Syncretic evolution and modded civics that also give slave species should get their equal numbers of future slaves.

Modded civics that give extra robots will get treated like Syncretics not Mechanists,but no one's told me about any of these yet. As they say, we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.

Revision to initial pop and hostile nation tile blocker system, much better support of DLC restricted starts. Mechanist still needs 2 more starting robots, and mods that give slaves without the syncretic evolution civic aren't getting checked for correctly just yet.

For all starts, out of every 8 pops, fanatical ethics give you 2 loyal pops of your ethics, 4 of neutral ethics that can form factions when they get another pop of those ethics, and 2 of hostile ethics that get replaced by tile blockers that (eventually, not in this patch yet) will give pops of your species when cleared.

Vanilla, Life Seeded, and modded starts get 16 pops total, 2 of each ethic. Note that this means you'll get enough to form factions for your non-empire ethics on day one.

Syncretic gives 1 pop of each ethic and 8 tile blockers that will give your secondary species when cleared, once I figure out how to do that

Mechanists get 1 pop of each ethic and 4 bots (currently only 2), plus 4 extra own species blockers representing those unemployed by the 4 bots.

Post-Apocalyptic gets 8 pops total. You already went thru all the fighting the other starts are going to have to, a few hostiles of your species to clear and you're good.

Machine empires will get 8 pops of empire ethics, plus 8 blockers of their organic creators to love/assimilate/purge

Hives will get 8 loyal drones and 8 blockers of their species loyal to another hivemind

So long as you pick your TB's to clear in the correct order (unify your species first, then go after your slaves) nobody should face worse than a fair fight, and you'll be the one with the growing pops and who can build extra armies. But it should give you a run for your money. Once I get the wars coded, next update.

Update for compatibility with SSTL.

Pirates already depended on you having FTL, or should have, so I didn't do much with them. if you're getting pirates before reliable hyperdrive please say so.

Exploited a bug so that experimental drive should come available as soon as you finish either physics lab 1 or fusion power. I'm less sure it'll work if ion thrusters is the last prereq you need.

Initial pops reworked. You start with 8, 1 of each ethic. Pops of ethics opposed to yours form their own nations, as tile blockers. Neutrals join you but are likely to form their factions. So Fanatics start with more faction trouble but more pops, 3 ethic empires have 1 less pop and 1 less faction.

Still very much a WIP, doesn't yet account for any of the DLC special starts. Will keep working on this.

Attempted fix to rivalries in 2.02 beta

Max signed INT is 2.1 billion and change, not 2.4. In an ENTIRELY unrelated note, found the reason AI hates researching FTL techs.

Seriously, I'm really sorry for all the time I've made you guys waste.

Tweaked national tile blocker generation to be slightly more consistent